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From: David.Andrews@f89.n129.z1.fidonet.org (David Andrews)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Mountbatten Brailler
Message-ID: <15695@handicap.news>
Date: 15 May 91 18:07:20 GMT
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Index Number: 15695

[This is from the Blink Talk Conference]

I had an opportunity to try out the Mountbatten Brailler the
other day.  It will be sold by HumanWare and costs $2595.  There
are forward and reverse translators available at an extra cost.
The quality of the braille was pretty good.  The keyboard was a
little different, the keys are at a slight angle from straight up
and down, and the backspace and line space are in different
places, although you can remap the keyboard.  It is on the slow
side, 7 characters a second I think.  You can braille and store
in memory, turning off the actual brailling.  So, you could use
it for taking notes, and printing them later.
You can also hook up a regular keyboard.  There are two ways to
correct mistakes, one immediately substitutes the new character,
which works pretty well.  You can also just blank out a mistake,
creating an empty space.  However, if you go back and braille a
character there, some of the old dots may come up again, so the
direct substitution method works better.
This would have been a more attractive device if it had come in
under $2000, but it didn't, so we shall see.

... David Andrews

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